John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum review - mayhem in Manhattan

★★★★ JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 3 - PARABELLUM Mayhem in Manhattan

Latest instalment of Keanu's hitman saga sustains a ferocious pace

Keanu Reeves’s hitman franchise is blossoming into a delirious little earner. This third instalment reunites the star with director Chad Stahelski – who used to be Keanu’s stunt double in the Matrix films – and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, and keeps the action cranked to melting point for its two-hours-plus running time.

CD: Abdesselam Damoussi and Nour Eddine - Jedba

★★★★ ABDESSELAM DAMOUSSI AND NOUR EDDINE - JEDBA Mesmerising musical ecstasies from Morocco

Mesmerising musical ecstasies from Morocco

It’s not often that music of this kind gets a release outside of Morocco, and Arc Music and the producer/musicians must be applauded for curating such an intense, inside view on the ecstatic release of Sufi music across the kingdom, often drawn from a simple street or domestic setting.

theartsdesk in Essaouira: Festival of Gnawa - 21st-century trance masters

★★★★ THE ARTS DESK IN ESSAOUIRA: FESTIVAL OF GNAWA 21st-century trance masters

Previewing Moroccan trance music coming to London and Womad this summer

Essaouira, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, is the place of winds. Day or night, hot or cold, year in, year out, the “Alizee” blows, and it blows. In the local folklore it is not from the ocean but a grumbling resident of the medina – perhaps protesting the town’s rapid recent expansion, its port’s modernisation and the loss of legendary Chez Sam, the restaurant once beloved by an Othello-filming Orson Welles.

Blue Planet II, BBC One review - just how fragile?

★★★★★ BLUE PLANET II, BBC ONE Attenborough asks: just how fragile?

Spectacle and storytelling combine into an urgent plea for our oceans’ health

The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die.

CD: Tamikrest - Kidal

★★★ CD: TAMIKREST - KIDAL The tired sound of one camel walking

The tired sound of one camel walking

Tamikrest’s fourth album is well-presented, good enough, but a little hamstrung by what have become the clichés of the modern Touareg genre: the lilting rhythms of a camel cruising slowly across the dunes, intertwined guitars that smoothly swirl bewteen old Tamashek melodies and gentle riffs that might have come from the Deep South.

Casablanca

TAD AT 5: CASABLANCA: Happy 70th to a masterpiece they're playing again

The masterpiece that fused romantic melodrama with film noir to fight isolationism

You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco.

Allied

ALLIED Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood

Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood

While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad).

Mobydick: North Africa's outrageous rapper

MOBYDICK: NORTH AFRICA'S OUTRAGEOUS RAPPER Morocco's dissenting rapper talks about opposing ISIS, women's rights and manga

North Africa's dissenting rapper talks about opposing ISIS, women's rights and manga

A couple of years ago I saw an extraordinary outdoor concert where a rapper called Muslim (great name if you want to be hard to find on Google) performed at the Timitar Festival in Agadir in the South of Morocco to 80,000 delirious fans. The song which everyone knew was “Al Rissala" (The Letter) which called out corruption and ignorance in high places. The Festival acts as a kind of safety valve for dissent.

Our Kind of Traitor

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR Ewan McGregor is an accidental nemesis in another Le Carré tirade against the establishment

Ewan McGregor is an accidental nemesis in another Le Carré tirade against the establishment

John Le Carré made it quite clear what he thinks of the new world order in The Night Manager. All together now: a nexus of corrupt money and sinister establishment interests make for cynical realpolitik. It’s a persuasive weltanschauung that plays well to millennials priced out of their own future by ungovernable global forces beyond the reproof of electorates. But the message can become a bit of a stuck record. Take Our Kind of Traitor.

Le Corsaire, English National Ballet, Coliseum

Spectacular dance fireworks make this hoariest and silliest of Russian classics worth seeing

It’s being sold as the ideal ballet for first-timers, but I would blush to introduce even my neighbour’s cat to this Carry On Up the Harem hokum. Worse, its silliness verges on offensive. When, in Rudolph Nureyev’s 1990s production of La Bayadère for Paris Opera Ballet, a chorus of blacked-up picaninnies appeared for about three minutes, you blinked and put it down to an unwise attempt at historical accuracy.